Wireless communication networks, such as those supporting mobile telephone and data services, naturally have operational limitations. These limitations may be physical limitations, such as equipment limitations, frequency allocations, power limits, base station placement, antenna configurations, noise, environmental factors, or otherwise. Limitations may also be introduced by suboptimal system configurations. One manifestation of wireless system limitation is a ceiling on capacity. Capacity can be considered in terms of a number of mobile radios supported, a data rate supported, a number of calls supported, or some other measure of wireless system capacity.
Vendors of mobile communication infrastructure equipment sometimes offer radio resource management (RRM) features. While these RRM features can be leveraged to relieve brief, periodic congestion problems, the solutions offered are generally locally oriented over a limited physical domain. Moreover, such techniques are generally based on reducing user resources. For example, degrading call or data quality, blocking calls, forcing handovers, and call preemption are some traditional RRM techniques. Such capacity overload mitigation techniques may be suitable for brief periods of congestion. For example, on the scale of seconds or tens of minutes. However, such approaches do not typically support persistent capacity improvement. Furthermore, these approaches generally do not guarantee call quality or support increased long-term traffic trends.
Traditionally long-term solutions to capacity problems in wireless communication networks involve acquiring additional resources. For example, purchasing and installing additional base station equipment is a typical approach to increasing the capacity of a mobile communication system. Unfortunately, such an approach can have considerable lead-time delays as well as considerable costs in both capital expenditure and operating expenses. Furthermore, adding physical resources is generally a locally isolated solution with little flexibility for reallocating increased capacity within the network.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.